The VA: The Department Of Delay, Deceit, And Dumb Disorder

GLEN COVE, NY–The two largest components of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (the VA) are the Veterans’ Health Administration (VHA) and the Veterans’ Benefits Administration (VBA). Both are riddled with dishonesty, inefficiency, and ineptitude.

The VHA is in the news for a scandal involving the falsification of records. The VHA runs hundreds of hospitals called Medical Centers (VAMCs) and clinics, especially Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs). The VHA’s primary mission is to treat all diseases and injuries incurred in the line of duty, as well as the other diseases and injuries of the most severely disabled in the line of duty.

The VHA provides additional services to other veterans, depending on the overall health of the veterans and their resources, based on a complex system of priorities. Veterans who do not meet the requirements for free care and do not actually use the VAMCs often carry a VA card and are counted into patient statistics.

For the most part, the VAMCs provide excellent medical treatment; for typical war injuries, such as amputations, brain trauma, paralysis, and post-traumatic stress disorders, it is the best care in the world. The problem with VA health care is primarily administrative, rather than medical.

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The large national veterans’ service organizations make budget requests to Congress every year. Typically, Congress gives the VA a little less than everything the organizations ask for. The exception is facilities’ construction. The budget for the construction of new buildings or wings at VAMCs is so small and inadequate that the VHA is often given an increase in doctors and other health professionals without corresponding space for them to work.

When doctors leave the VHA, it usually takes at least six months to replace them. The doctors are bureaucratically unable to step outside of their specialties, and veterans often are left without care until their specialists are replaced.

The money appropriated for the VHA is too often used for middle-level management, rather than for doctors and other health care professionals. The number of injured veterans returning from our recent wars has grown substantially, in part because so many lives of severely injured soldiers and Marines can now be saved. Although the budget for veterans’ health care keeps increasing, it is insufficient to meet the increasing demand.

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Getting an initial appointment to see a specialist is a lengthy process. One reason for the delay is the requirement that veterans see general practitioners before they can see specialists for the first time. Another reason is the low skills and poor training of VA receptionists and telephone operators. The result is that VAMCs are unable to meet the national target of seeing every veteran within 14 days of the date requested. Instead, veterans often wait months for the first appointment.

Several years ago, the VHA circulated an eight-page list of prohibited ways to falsify the statistics. Despite this measure, we are now learning that the practice has survived of not entering veterans’ information in the computer until virtually the eve of their first appointments, so that the appointment requests appear later than they actually were. The practice of giving veterans appointments at nonexistent clinics and changing them to real clinics on the eve of the appointments has also endured.

The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.